At the initiation of a course of treatment within the Five Element model, the patient and practitioner engage in an initial discussion known as the Traditional Diagnosis (TD). For the patient, this conversation is an opportunity to make known his or her chief complaints and overall goals for treatment. For the practitioner, it is the most important step in treatment planning, because it is the first opportunity to determine the patient’s Causative Factor (CF). The CF is an important piece of the diagnostic puzzle because it is the source of the individual’s primary (or root cause of) imbalance, which in turn “causes” a domino effect of imbalance within the patient as a whole through impaired sheng and k’o cycles.
During the information-rich
During the information-rich